Neighboring Cell Support (NCS) is a feature in the Operations Support System for Radio & Core (OSS-RC) in a Wideband Code Division Multiple Access (WCDMA) network. The NCS feature in the OSS-RC is configured to collect information in the WCDMA network from a number of different sources, and present the results to an operator of the WCDMA network in various reports.
For example, via the Configuration Service (CS) in the OSS-RC, the NCS feature may collect data from different network elements. This may comprise Radio Network Controllers (RNCs) and cells present in the WCDMA radio access network, the frequencies and scrambling codes used by the cells, the defined neighboring relations of each cell, positional data of each cell, etc.
According to another example, the NCS feature may also collect information from Performance Management counters that measure the extent of defined neighboring cell relations usage.
According to a further example, a User Equipment (UE) continuously monitors its radio environment. Not only neighboring cells that are defined as neighboring cells in the a cell's neighboring cell list are measured, but also cells that are undefined neighboring cells can be detected with the background scanning process in the UE. The UE is configured to evaluate and send measurement reports to the network only when certain events occur, such as e.g. when the measurement result for a cell fulfills certain criteria. This concept is called event-triggered reporting. These events are collected by the General Performance Event Handling (GPEH) function in the WCDMA network. The NCS feature may schedule recordings of GPEH events for each cell, collect the files of the recordings, and processes the GPEH events related to the measurement of surrounding cells of each cell.
Thus, the NCS feature enables an operator of the WCDMA network to view its reports in order to generate and update the neighboring cell lists of the cells with properly defined neighboring cell relations. In the WCDMA network, the neighboring cell lists are used when performing soft-handovers (SOHO) between cells.
While properly defined neighboring cell relations is one of the most contributing factors to fewer dropped calls when performing SOHO in a WCDMA network, achieving such properly defined neighboring cell relations requires a lot of resources and knowledge of neighboring cell relations from the operator. Also, dependent on the knowledge of the operator on neighboring cell relations and resources, the configuration and updates of neighboring cell list for a cell in a WCDMA network may differ significantly.